The website of Tether, issuer of the stablecoin USDT, suffered a massive DDoS attack last June 18.
The company's chief technology officer Paolo Ardoino has said the attackers demanded a "ransom" in USDT.
He has said:
"This morning Tether received a ransom request to avoid mass DDOSes. They tried already once. On a normal day we have around 2k reqs/5min The attack brought us to 8M reqs/5min."
The tether.io portal allows exchanging stablecoins for US dollars in a 1:1 ratio. The minimum exchange amount is 100,000 USDT.
Subscribe to our Telegram channel to get daily short digests about events that shape the crypto world
According to the company's CTO, Tether took measures to mitigate the impact of the attack and the attackers "relaxed" the pressure on the system. He has also stressed the incident will not affect the ability to redeem USDT positions.
In spite of the collapse of the crypto market, USDT has maintained parity with the US dollar, although its market capitalization continues to fall.